The top 10 states with the most pollution, in rough order and with rough estimates from the 8/18/14 reports to the EPA of 2013 Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Large Faciliities, are

Texas, 410M tons

Indiana, 150M tons

Pennsylvania, 148M tons

Illinois, 140M tons

Louisiana, 138M tons

Ohio, 136M tons

Florida, 125M tons

California, 110M tons

Kentucky, 108M tons

Alabama, 101M tons

California is the only one of the top top states to charge polluters. Washington State only has 25 tons of pollution! And if that program goes through, they on track to raise a billion dollars from charging the market price for carbon pollution.

What an opportunity for these other 9 states!

The people in those states have more fuel, so to speak, for a successful marketplace for a price for pollution, because there's so much more of it. They're leaving lots of money on the table today (Texas could have an annual $4 billion program at $10/ton). And it's so much better to tax pollution than, say, sales of food or income.

Another way to look at this chart is how much we're currently subsidizing polluters (at $10/ton to make the math easy) by not charging them anything for their pollution, by state. And another way of saying the same thing is how much more of a tax burden we're putting on families in each of these states because they are forced to make up for the lack of pollution fees that the polluters aren't contributing to the public sector.

It may be perverse, but all this pollution creates a great opportunity for better policy!

The biggest polluter in Illinois is a huge coal power plant owned by a Texas utility Dynegy. The Baldwin Plant alone pollutes 12 million tons of carbon (out of a statewide total of 91 million). Most of the 91 million is from coal power plants. And we don't charge them anything for that pollution.

The market price for a ton of carbon pollution is apparently about $12/ton. If Illinois decided to quit subsidizing these polluters and had them pay the market price for their pollution, we'd generate more than a billion dollars -- annually. (91 million tons times $12/ton).

To put that in context, all the debate over lowering the state income tax from 5% to 3.75% will cost about $3 billion. We could lower the income tax even more down to 3.25% with the money we could raise from charging polluters a market price.

Thanks to the feds compiling this data (which is only about half the total carbon emissions), we're in a place to sketch out what a fee on carbon pollution might actually generate. That's very helpful.